Gary did you come up with the 0.5m number or is that a factory default? Also what payload did you have one your copter? 3 axis gimbal? What camera? Any idea of weight?
Hello Gary, I have my Jeti DS-16 set mode 2 and the vario control to "0"--Auto. I found that putting the gas stick around center and then initiating the TO switch yielded good results. I did also find that if I did not initiate the TO switch after about 10sec. the kopter would take off any way in vario. This occurred once and I have not replicated it since the first time. I set the climb rate to 5 (.5m/sec) for a slower descend. You are correct that it does seem like an eternity at higher altitudes. My final landing was quite bouncy...need to see what would improve a more solid landing. Maybe need to increase the climb rate. I am also looking at multiple TOs-LNDs on a single power cycle and different results being in GPS pos. hold on vs. off. I noticed that Holger has increased the NC-SPI comm. from 25Hz to 41Hz. The GPS pos. hold did seem snappier to respond and exhibited improved wind resistance. So far, a good upgrade all around. Greetings, Adam
Adam I was landing in grass so that may have absorbed any bounce. It is still light on the skids until I throttled back to idle, basically trying to hover on the ground.
I upgraded to 0.91 this afternoon. I didn't have any problems with the upgrade as it took it on the first try for me for both the FCB and Nav firmware. I have Gary's exact settings (thanks for taking the lead on this) except I'm using a Gyro D of 12 not 25. I only took it up for one flight so its hard for me to tell but it seems to fly identical for me at least which is extremely good. The AH is rock solid and the PH varies plus or minus a couple meters. I do like the double stick start but I don't like the double stick stop as I "almost" let go of the left stick before remembered to pull the right stick down left. I did not test auto take off or land as I will never use those. I primarily wanted to upgrade to get the improved emergency landing feature and dual stick power on for the motors. A couple other little tid bits I noticed is that you don't reference Poti anymore when assigning AH and PH. Instead you assign it the channel number you assign to the poti on the channels screen. It was nice having 3 computers open at the same time. One with Gary's settings, one a screen shot of my old settings, and one for the laptop connected to MKtools.
Dave you should test the landing feature following the steps in the Wiki page so that you can make adjustments to the rate of descent.
I setup auto takeoff and land to work well. I set the landing to 0.4 m/s and it worked really good. Very soft landing. So I then tried emergency landing. I put the copter up in the air around 25 meters and then turned the radio off. The copter went to my come home altitude I set at 60 meters and hovered. I set it to 60 meters because that's probably the highest I will be flying. It then went into emergency landing and it fell way too fast. It was at the same rate the emergency landing was before I upgraded. When I tried emergency landing in 90J I had emergency gas set at 85%. This time I'm using the exact same settings as Gary (see below). Checking the GPX log (by the way it is nice to have 5 log points per second) it was dropping as fast as 7 m/s before I gained control of it about 20 meters in altitude. There's no way that it would have slowed the copter that much if I would have kept the radio on. So I'm not sure what to do with the settings but any advice is appreciated. Since this is all a beta version and nobody else has pretty much tested it or confirmed the settings I thought I would at least pass on my test findings. I"m running a CS8, 3 axis gimbal, Sony PJ760 and 2 QC 6200 batteries. The weight of the copter is right around 11 pounds 10 ounces Here's my settings
Do a posting over on the MK forum in the post from Holger about the upgrade and ask the question. It may be that it doesn't start slowing down until much closer to the ground. Update: Posted the question to Holger.
Dave not that it will make much difference but the Min Gas on your Misc is what I use with the I2C. Default is usually about a 7 or 8.
I went over to the mikrokopter.de forum page and couldn't even figure out how to register. When I hit english it said page not found. Anyway I looked over the GPX file. I was failing at 6 meters per second at an altitude of 36 meters. Here's a recap of the GPX log Hovers at 60 meters at 0.05 m/s Goes into emergency landing at 187 seconds into the flight Accelerates to 4 m/s at 50.7 meters in altitude at 193 seconds into the flight Accelerates to 5 m/s at 44 meters in altitude at 194 seconds into the flight Accelerates to 6 m/s at 40 meters in altitude at 194.5 seconds into the flight Reaches a peak of 6.2 m/s at 38 meters in altitude at 195 seconds into the flight which at this point my radio kicked back on and you see my left stick go fully up at this point. This is using your 95% emergency gas setting and a 0.4 m/s rate. In testing you really don't have much room for error because it takes about 1.5 seconds from the time you turn the radio back on before the stick commands effect the copters movement. That's about as comfortable as I will go with giving me a little safety cushion. One other thing of interest is that when it went into come home mode it moved to a spot 5 meters west of where it actually took off (not too bad for the MK GPS) however during emergency landing it swayed off course another 15 meters due west so if it actually hit the ground it would have been 20 meters west from where it actually took off. Maybe wind had a small factor in this my windbuttometer estimates 5 mph during the flight. Didn't notice the direction of the wind at the time since it was minimal. I would think at the rate it fell the wind shouldn't have had much effect. So once or "if" I can get the emergency gas to work correctly I would need to factor in a good 20-25 square meters of clear launch space if the copter is going to come down and not hit anything.
Holger's reply. Based on this your CH altitude is to high, we need to turn on Vario % and increase the descent rate. I use this setting: - I would recommend a minimum landing speed of 1.0m/sek - otherwise it would take too long to get down - do not select a too high altitude for CH - Vario use for failsafe and about 85-90% gas - that is the laststep failsafe in the case and brings the MK Quickly back to earth if it did not reach the CH-point within 60seconds
Gary thanks for helping. Not sure how how a faster descent rate will help. Plus he's testing this on lighter copters most likely. Maybe checking the vario control will help? I can try it with a CH of 30 meters with these suggestions and see what happens.
Ah the dreaded German. The English button link has always been problematic. I switched to using Google Chrome and it seems to auto translate everything. On the advanced settings you can set it up to auto translate.
Dis a short couple of hops this evening and changed the descent rate to 11 (1.1m/s). It comes down faster than the 5 value but still under control, landing was not that much firmer and there was no bounce. Let it set and the engines do throttle down from below hover. So think I will leave it there for the time being. Also there was no appreciable change in the auto takeoff after making the descent change.
Gary is the check box labeled vari-control for failsafe for situations where it doesn't make come home? Or do you think that will affect the descent rate?
Dave no idea. But if Holger has it turned on I turn it on. Maybe when Andy gets back from his shoot in a couple of weeks he can look at the new code. Based on what Holger said in his reply it sounded like it is used in the case that the copter doesn't get to it's home position in 60 seconds it automatically starts a descent. But which descent rate is used needs to be decoded.